I'm not in Columbus and only have vague familiarity with the local radio landscape, but I was wondering... has there ever been any attempts at running AAA ? It seems like a lot of the market ingredients that allow AAA to succeed are present in Columbus, but I don't see anything in the market that looks like AAA currently or in recent history.
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AAA in Columbus
- Thread starter Ryan Williams
- Start date
CD101 tried it in, I think the early 90s? Response wasn't so great. WCBE does in some dayparts.
There were nearly riots (figuratively speaking) when CD101 started adding Tom Petty and Bob Dylan to the Alternative back then. I recall reading that then-owner Roger Vaughn admired KBCO Denver and wanted to replicate that sound here.
Yes, strictly speaking non-comm WCBE is largely AAA, but they seem to go out of their way to avoid anything that's ever been even on the fringes of a chart. I've often wondered why there haven't been any attempts at commercial AAA in this educated, white-collar-heavy, big-university market for 30 years.
Yes, strictly speaking non-comm WCBE is largely AAA, but they seem to go out of their way to avoid anything that's ever been even on the fringes of a chart. I've often wondered why there haven't been any attempts at commercial AAA in this educated, white-collar-heavy, big-university market for 30 years.
The audience tends to be over 50 and very hostile to advertising. Thus, non-com. But yes, almost 70% have college degrees. More than a third are over 55.
Is it advertising they're hostile to, or tone? I'm nowhere near WRSI (93.9 The River) in Western MA and stream it often. I think their advertising is mostly local and well produced, so hearing a block of ads for businesses I can't even use is less irritating than local stations that are over produced with lazy copy.
I think sometimes the audience of AAA gets unfairly typecast as a bunch of aging hippies who can't stand capitalism. So many of the core artists have transcended that over time I don't think it's the same today. Especially with streaming, the "boundaries" of what people like have expanded to a point where the "format" such as it is is more a mindset.
I think sometimes the audience of AAA gets unfairly typecast as a bunch of aging hippies who can't stand capitalism. So many of the core artists have transcended that over time I don't think it's the same today. Especially with streaming, the "boundaries" of what people like have expanded to a point where the "format" such as it is is more a mindset.
When I worked for a cluster that had a AAA, we had to keep the volume of spots down relative to our other stations. Most of our stations had three four minute breaks an hour except in drive time. In the afternoon, we did three five minute breaks. We had two four minute breaks with two five minute stopsets during drive time on our AAA. Mornings had more breaks and sponsorships on each, but the AAA still had fewer.
Advertisers tended to have some reservation about the AAA audience. I don't think it was necessarily an impression that the audience was hostile to ads themselves but a notion that the AAA audience was more careful and discriminating with its money. If you were trying to dazzle the audience with something cool that it just had to have, that wasn’t your crowd. Those were the people who stuck to their shopping lists and looked at every item and expense.
I don’t know that we saw much of that, but, in a college town, a large counterculture population has always been here and has always walked among us. I've seen change in the 20+ years that I've lived in Collegetown USA, and that change has been toward further acceptance. Acceptance, though, has always been more of the norm than the exception when compared to the rest of the area. That was part of the reason so many of them settled here in the first place.
You have to admit, there's a fair amount of that. Also, because of the schizophrenic nature of a AAA music mix, the format suffered TSL issues. Big swings in variety meant the tune-out factor for AAA was a serious problem. Given that advertisers are interested in the same 'reach' model as online, not being able to keep listeners through at least one-quarter hour proved to be a problem.
You inadvertently make a good point. If someone wants variety, they don't need to wait around listening to some radio station play a variety that pleases one or two of the potentially thousands of ears listening at a given moment. One can get the variety they crave by setting up their playlist via streaming, or listening to some eclectic streaming provider like Radioparadise.com.
PPM also showed that AAA didn't get much, if any, "phantom listening" that most other stations got. Most stations had listeners who tended not to report listening in the diary that got picked up when the switch to PPM happened, but your average AAA saw very little of that. Given that most people listened less than reported in the diary, most AAA's got hit hard after the switch to PPM as it didn't have enough unreported listening to replace the audience that tuned out more often than it said.
During my more than 20 years in this market, I was one of the youngest listeners to our local AAA when I moved here at age 26. Today, I'm still one of the youngest a few months shy of my 50th birthday. Much of the AAA audience, at least the audience that was listening to the radio, has aged out of the money demos. Much as I like the local AAA, I can't imagine it's going to be sustainable much longer.
You also should recall its origins as what I've called "a farm town with a big university attached". While it's not much of a farm town any more, go five miles out of the city and things are a little different. Which is why the C3 signal is perfect for the AAA station. As long as it doesn't cost much to run, I wouldn't expect Cumulus to ditch it. It's a part of the portfolio that the main competitor isn't matching.
One thing to consider: if that station did dump AAA, I suspect that the long-standing noncommercial open-access station in the city would try to pick it up (as kind of happened in the 1990s for a while), and, there, you might really feel the anti-establishment vibes coming through, if any such vibes remain.
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I don't disagree there's more ways to get it without needing "radio" to do so.
What I tend to see the value in is the curation. A lot of people are too busy to mess with playlist creation or finding the curator to follow, in which case a well programmed Triple A station has value. If I'm in Denver and not in the radio business, I may not have time to curate a list of songs for myself or find the new music that I can be introduced to by flipping between KTCL, KBCO and two non-comm Triple A outlets. It's an effective method to get it. When I'm in the mood for hits, a well-programmed classic hits or classic rock station does exactly what I need. No need to synch a device or go to the right list of songs.
I'm not naive enough to recommend in most markets if any, that a startup Triple A is a wise strategy. And I'll also concur that done badly (and goodness have I heard it done badly) it can have a mix that's imbalanced, even if the individual tracks are fine. There are outlets in the format that despite my pretty diverse tastes, I simply find poorly programmed. You have to have a programmer that's the right balance of musically aware and yet not self-indulgent past the point the audience can handle. And because of these new options, a lot of them are less patient than they used to be (witness the alternative in NYC argument.)
The problem is that there's no standard for what is good or bad. It's all individual. That's what's killing the format. Because by definition, a format has to be a standard. And AAA music is very individual. The artists are very unique, and their fan bases are all unique. So finding any kind of consensus with the music is next to impossible. This is affecting a lot of genres, and there's a movement in the music industry to eliminate genre, and make all music the same. That will make radio programming even more difficult moving forward.
But that's the thing, someone listening to Spotify or Pandora doesn't need to sync anything. If your tastes lean toward AAA, then the algorithm takes care of curating the music for you, probably closer to your individual taste than some PD sitting in front of a Selector(tm) terminal programming music on a radio station intended for thousands, not just one listener. Even then, as BigA mentioned, AAA is one of those formats that doesn't lend itself to a larger audience, so broadcasting doing AAA, is a tough row to hoe.
I'd push that one more step: Both AAA and Smooth Jazz are a sure way to drive a station into abject failure. Both involve similar reasons.
But that's the problem again with AAA. The titles are not in most cases time tested hits. Either they're newer little-known artists that represent a tune out possibility for the died-in-the-wool rock fan, or don't go with more traditional artists and titles. At least with formats like Classic Rock, Country, or Pop, the music has a history, researched, or both. Play one eclectic, out of left field, song and you lose 45% of your remaining listeners in a quarter-hour like that (snap finger). With the exception of public stations and in a PPM market, losses like that are quite simply, death.
Can't argue with most of that.
The one thing I do think is different about the audience Triple A attempts to target is that (theoretically) they're more open to the new music that's compatible with the other stuff. So if I'm tuned to, say, XRT, where I trust the talent and like the mix overall - most of which is pretty proven and fits into a reasonable consensus of "quality rock" - artists that have been proven over time, have a legacy, the core of hits..then I'm probably going to be fairly open to the new music mixed in, and if it isn't my favorite, it's probably tolerable. So the logic is the trust with the audience. I'm not so sure your core XRT or KINK listener is as likely to punch out based on one current if they're into 90 percent of the core library.
The one thing I do think is different about the audience Triple A attempts to target is that (theoretically) they're more open to the new music that's compatible with the other stuff. So if I'm tuned to, say, XRT, where I trust the talent and like the mix overall - most of which is pretty proven and fits into a reasonable consensus of "quality rock" - artists that have been proven over time, have a legacy, the core of hits..then I'm probably going to be fairly open to the new music mixed in, and if it isn't my favorite, it's probably tolerable. So the logic is the trust with the audience. I'm not so sure your core XRT or KINK listener is as likely to punch out based on one current if they're into 90 percent of the core library.
But, if you look at the TSL of remaining AAA stations, they've been on the upside down hockey stick for the past ten to fifteen years. Some of that may be the age of the listener moving onto other formats like right-wing talk (you'd be surprised) or streaming. An audience in age less that 45, no longer has the attention span to sit around waiting for an interesting mix. They already get it from their favorite streaming platform on demand.
Compare the core in-demo ratings of those remaining stations from ten years ago till today and tell me if there is any hope of growth in that format.